There’s something in the water. Maggie Q starring as the title character in the new fall series Nikita. Grace Park, who went from Boomer Valerii in Battlestar Galactica to Kono in the new Hawaii Five-O series. (Both Boomer and Kono were guys in the original series). And now Ellen Wong as the kick-ass ex-girlfriend in Universal Pictures’ newest film starring geek god Michael Cera, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
Ellen Wong and Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
Ellen Wong plays Michael Cera's obsessed girlfriend. Photo by Kerry Hayes, courtesy of Universal Studios.
Hollywood’s noticing this rise of girl power, too. Wong was recently on Entertainment Weekly‘s Women Who Can Kick Ass Panel at Comic-Con in San Diego, Calif. last month. The panel included Jena Malone (Sucker Punch), Anna Torv (Fringe), Elizabeth Mitchell (V), and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Scott Pilgrim), and the hour-long discussion was moderated by Nicole Sperling. All the women agreed upon the importance of doing their own stunts even though Malone gives credit to stunt doubles. “You can’t fit seven years of mastery into three months of training,” she said. Wong echoed this sentiment and discovered that doing her own stunts “gives you so much power when you get to do a superhero movie, like running up a wall and flipping.” In fact, right before the convention, she went skydiving and “screamed and let it all out,” said Wong.
Based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is about Scott Pilgrim (played by Michael Cera), a bass guitarist for the band Sex Bob-omb, who couldn’t be happier with his life until he meets the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead). In order to be with her, Pilgrim discovers that he must first defeat all of her seven evil exes, who are all trying to kill him.Staying true to the graphic novel series, the movie features text bubbles and other cartoon-style elements. Actions are punctuated with “POW” and “WHIP,” while some of the battle scenes are marked by Mario Life 1-Ups and coins that spill from the defeated enemy as it would in a video game.
Michael Cera and Satya Bhabha in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
There’s plenty of AA representation in the film, too. There’s Canadian actor, poet and playwright Jean Yoon, best know for her role as Betty Ong in The Path to 9/11, plays Knives Chau’s mother. And recent Yale grad Satya Bhabha plays Matthew Patel, one of Ramona’s evil exes Scott must defeat. Bhabha seems to be a superhero in real life, too, a recipient of the Louis Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Arts whose parents, an Indian/Parsi father and German Jewish mother, are “noted Harvard scholars.”
Michael Cera and Satya Bhabha.
And of course, there’s Wong, who plays Knives Chau, Scott’s obsessed ex-girlfriend. And if the trailer for Scott Pilgrim is any indication, boy, can she pack a punch. Pow Pow.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World opens this Friday the 13th.
Photos courtesy of Universal Pictures.
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Scott Pilgrim film celebrates mediocrity
It was difficult for me to identify with a whiny, lazy, twenty-something main character who leeches off his friends, makes no attempt to get a job (and bails often on his band practice), dates a minor (Knives Chau, called Chinese though she is clearly Canadian in the film as much as Pilgrim’s character is), and cheats on, dumps his faithful minor-girlfriend for a woman with commitment issues. Plus, I was disappointed that all the one dimensional Asian American characters were either killed, or in the case of Knives Chau, punched in the face. I expected a more entertaining film from Shawn of the Dead director Edgar Wright. Sorry, but the original Matrix did the comic book thing much better in the late 90s.